Bill Gates | Steve Jobs | Larry Ellison | Scott Ragsdale up for sale

With a new application on Facebook you can put your friends for sale. Knowing that a large number of CEOs of large companies are on facebook, I can just imagine the fun when Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison and Scott Ragsdale go on sale.

It would be interesting to see if the CEOs are in a common network and one CEO puts up another CEO for sale. So imagine Scott Ragsdale CEO of naseba, puts up Bill gates for sale and Steve Jobs buys bill gates for $574 (a figure which I noticed at which one of my friends bought a friend).

So does that mean Steve can make Bill work for Apple? May be this application was launched keeping in mind Bill’s retirement plans.

So next time keep an eye, you never know you be able to buy Geroge bush

AMEX Kingfisher First Credit Card | How American Express is a truly Global Bank and caters to local needs.

AMEX Kingfisher First Credit Card How American Express is a truly Global Bank and caters to local needs.

Marketing + Technology = Speedy Search Engine Market Share

Case Study: On how American Express (AMEX) immediately responded to social media and how Web2.0 or Marketing 2.0 helped them gain a larger search engine pie in the local Indian market.

On Jan 27 2008 I blogged on how the TITANS came together and how AMEX credit cards co-branded with Kingfisher Airlines and Airtel VAS services. A month later I blogged about why AMEX-Kingfisher first cards should re-look at the SEO strategy. The global banking organization immediately responded to the need of the hour and came up with a swanky new optimized page. This page took a brilliant tagging approach and they chose the correct keywords this time to optimize the website and strongly came up within 3 days time. Not only this the existing corporate website web page which has branch webpage has been revamped with apt use of title tags, meta tags, variable names, form names etc.

The search engines respect the content and if the off-page and on-page content is optimized well the search engines will respect you and bring your website up on the rankings. How, I would want to term it as:

Marketing + Technology = Speedy Search Engine Market Share

In today’s world when the sales have a major component of online sales, it’s important to optimize your websites and have a clear SEO / SEM strategy and technology. Another thing in the Marketing 2.0 world is to look at the Social Media responsiveness. Obviously some companies are giving enough attention to this strategy and becoming customer centric.

Dissection of strategy:

Title Tags: “THE AMERICAN EXPRESS® KINGFISHER FIRST CREDIT CARD-HOME”. The clear use of keywords like: American express, Kingfisher First, Credit Card

Again the text used: “Get two or more Kingfisher Airlines tickets every year.” Or “Avail complimentary Airtel Virtual Calling card and Airtel Live! VAS card, plus other exciting special offers”
They have very well optimized keyword density.

One thing which is still missing is: Image name optimization. Right now the images used have names like: image top 1, image top 2, fastestwaytofly, body copy black etc. So essentially the names of the images are not optimized with keywords and summary is still missing in the HTML tags. Though it’s minor thing, but can be further helpful.

Happy optimizing and credit card selling!

Oh by the way, I am a customer of AMEX kingfisher card and I can comment on the service. I traveled from Bangalore to Delhi return and I got free tickets of Kingfisher Airlines which I booked through AMEX travel desk and as always the service was brilliant. So I enjoyed flying the good times with Kingfisher. Not only that I liked the payment methodology of AMEX as I can just log into my Citibank account and go to bills section and directly make an online payment. So isn’t it truly global services packaged for convenience in a localized format?

AMEX India marketing needs to re-look at SEO strategy

AMEX India marketing might need a couple of SEO Lessons for it’s credit cards business.

Just at the time when American Express (AMEX) is spending so much of advertising dollars on their AMEX credit cards like Platinum, Gold, and Kingfisher First and Lamborghini is on stake…strangely their website is not optimized for some crucial keywords i.e. Kingfisher and Lamborghini Gallardo.

One of the key hype factors used by AMEX is Kingfisher First tie up as well as Lamborghini Gallardo. When I was searching for “kingfisher AMEX card” my blog entry came up higher than the AMEX website.

The keywords used are: “keywords” content=”Apply, Online, Business, Travel, Service, Management, Cards, Commercial, Expenses, Corporate, Corporations, Events, Entertainment, Financial, small, medium, mid-sized, SME, company, business, Learn, Market, Purchasing, control, American Express, Credit, Amex, India”

However, 2 key keywords missing are kingfisher and Lamborghini. Just because of not using this keyword, AMEX might be loosing a large number of website visits. It should be part of the online marketing plan where they should optimize the website for certain buzzwords for a limited time period.

Another Goof-up is the unoptimized landing page by omniture which is being used for the Google ad-words SEM campaign.

Sponsored Link
Amex Platinum Credit Card

www.americanexpress.com/india/ Get a chance to Win A Lamborghini Hurry & Apply Today!

Again the page is not optimized for keywords though it does have the design element to attract the audience. Just like this instance, there are many organizations which have delved into the online space but it becomes apparent that the online strategy needs to be re-looked and given more attenion than being given now.

This can be because of the reasons that Indian market may not be that lucrative for AMEX as long as the online sales is considered. However, having a robust and integrated marketing strategy is mandatory these days and we should ignore the Indian market which is surely catching up with the fast growing number of subscribers in India.

Stop abusing the term “PR and Brand Awareness”

Stop abusing the term “PR and Brand Awareness”

This morning I was conducting an Interview of a young lady for the marketing position in my company. I explained various activities we do to market our products and the prime channel of marketing for us is Online and Email/Database marketing.

I explained to her in depth about the role and why we are doing what we are doing. All things went fine till she asked; “Would I be sending emails only? What about Direct Mailers, PR and event?”

Well it’s not just her. In India, for long, marketers have abused the term “brand awareness and PR”, in the pretext of in-ability to link it back to the expenditure done on marketing to sales conversion. Every time they had to do a brand awareness campaign, they want to spend marketing dollars on things which are least likely to give you the Brand Awareness and the worst ROIs.

I mean, even in today’s world if you say it’s a brand building activity and are not talking about the ROI, trust me you are bitten by something called as “Brand building pretension bug” and you are in a mythical world of Greek creatures waiting for some miracle.

I asked her, what are the things she wishes to do apart from email and online marketing? She said Direct mailers, Press Conference and Print ads.

I said “alright let’s start from the beginning”.

Direct Mailers: How much would one spend on creation of a direct mailer? Include the cost of designer, printing, envelope, couriering. We did some in-air calculations and arrived at approx INR 60/- per mailer. Now let’s assume we have to reach a database size of 10,000 people. So we spend approx INR 600K. Now let’s say the average cost of sales per product in the case in point is INR 15K. Therefore considering a very generous response rate of 2% you have 200 responses (though I don’t know if we can track the call to action back to the mailer). Let us assume we could. Now you have 200 people to whom you can start pitching, and with my experience I see the final leads to quotes to sales percentage would never go beyond 5%. So we are talking about 10 people who finally bought the product.

But it does raise some questions:

Did your DM reach the right person?
Do you know your Direct mailer was opened by someone?
Do you know your direct mailer was read by someone?
What happened? Did the person take the desired action on the mailer?
Lead creation time?

Let’s get down to business:

Interesting revenue generated: 15K (cost of product) * 10 (leads converted) = 150K. ROI = (150-600)/600= Loss of 75% on Marketing Investment
Ok let’s be generous: 20 people bought: 15K* 20 = 300K = ROI = (300-600)/600 = Loss of 50% on the marketing investment.
Let’s be more generous: 50 people bought: 15K * 50 = 750K
ROI = (750 – 600) / 600 = 25% profit. Oh I forgot to add the salary component of the marketing person. The cost just went up and this 25% loss became 0%.

No gain no loss. Do you need marketing?

Email Campaigns: Now let’s take another scenario:
We created an Email (design cost + email sending cost) per email = INR 5
We sent 10K emails = 10K * 5 = INR 50K

Now you can track if someone opened the mail, clicked on it, replied to it and more.
Within one day you have 200 leads.
Let’s assume the same leads getting converted: 10, 20, 50
ROI for 10 = (150K – 50K)/50 = 200% profit.

I don’t need to delve into simple maths any more

PR/Press Conference/Print-Ads

A small situational analysis here:

“Let’s assume that you went for a sales visit and are talking to the client. Do you ever say,” sir can you please open the newspaper of a particular date 2 months old?” Or “open that magazine page so and so, from 3 months ago?” Obviously not!

So if someone is an avid reader, they would have read your company’s press coverage or they would have read that magazine advertorial. However, you took an assumption here and if the assumption of an avid reader is taken away, it’s a rare chance that your coverage reached the right people at the right time.

However, the question is, how do you leverage the PR to work for you every time, non stop? How to make every single dollar spent on PR, Press Conference or print ads work for you?

Simple way of arriving at the answer:

Ask anyone around you at your work place or home or your sports game or a shopping mall, “what do you do when you need some information?”
Most common answer would be: “I google it.”
If people are searching the information online, then isn’t it obvious that your company’s PR related information should be available online?
Having said that, many companies are already doing it consciously or unconsciously, but is it the part of your planned strategy?
Are you making a conscious effort towards your web presence strategy?
It’s easy to make your online strategy and PR strategy work for you.

Strategy 1: Conversational Email Hyper-Linking: – While you are having an email communication with your client, subtly give a small link for the online press release which came just at the right time. This online press release link works immediately where your client will see it. Not just newspaper, but even the online media is talking about your company. While you were pitching to the client, this press release immediately added to your credibility. Also, you can use this online presence any time.

Additionally, while people will search for certain information online your “Search Engine Optimized” press release will come-up as a search result in google. And your customer might just land at the right page on your website and gets excited about what the press is talking about you.

Oh! And do not forget to use these links in a conversational way. Which means, while you are writing a message, create a conversational dialogue and hyperlink with a couple of words and link it to the press link.

Strategy 2: Email Signatures Hyper-Linking: -This is a simple one. Use your email signatures in text with a link to your press coverage. People have been using their email signatures as banners etc. However, these get blocked these days but the text links do not. So you might want to try this one.

Strategy 3: Newsletter: – Create a monthly/weekly/quarterly newsletter about educating the customers and prospects about what’s new in the industry. Put couple of observations in industry which are affecting the customers as well as propose a solution to same. Talk about any new citing or customer testimonial on how the new product feature is helping people using your product or service. Give links to the online press releases and showcase to customers how the press has talked about your company/product/service. Share some whitepapers/research reports that your company might have published.
Use this newsletter to talk about what others are talking about you instead of boasting about how good your product/service/company is.

Marketing 2.0 – eMarketing, Digital marketing, Interactive Marketing, Online marketing, Internet Marketing, Web marketing…

While I have been writing about Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Professional and social networking, here is the new paradigm or future of marketing or the Marketing 2.0. I was browsing through LinkedIn Answers and saw this question by a gentleman who wanted to know which term you would prefer out of E-Marketing, Web Marketing, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing or Interactive Marketing. Well I succinctly answered Marketing 2.0, as that is something which has changed the new rules of marketing and probably would make Kotler re-write his book.

In this entry I am touching upon various elements of Marketing 2.0 and how it can benefit your organization. When I say your organization in this post, I mean both B2B as well as B2C businesses.

These would be some of the basic elements of Marketing 2.0:

Online communities, Blogs, User-generated content, Email Marketing, Viral Videos, Online PR, Flash Ads, Torrents, Porn Sites, Software Downloads, Banners, Link Exchanges, Micro Sites, Landing page optimizations, triggered ads, behavioral ads, web analytics, SEO SMO and SEM.

Online communities, Blogs, Social / Professional Networking and User Generated Content: –

Earlier I wrote about push marketing being dead and how 4Rs of marketing namely Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain has changed the approach of marketing to customer centric marketing.

This can be simple achieved today through online communities or Blogs where users generate content and the content becomes the king. So instead of pushing the message out, you are able to pull the customers towards you and with Content being the king, people get motivated to come back. There are numerous examples of this technique: like LinkedIn, Xing, and many more.

How they sell?

Online communities and blogs market and sell the products through subtle hints which might be relevant to the audience. Considering the context and relevancy approach is more suited to the audience, they tend to look at what is on offer and if that is something which is of importance to them at that time, they make a buying decision.

Email marketing: Many online community and blog owners use an additional tactic of Email marketing. Additionally many product and services companies also leverage email marketing media. It has shown highest ROIs for a long time now and the effectiveness has been good. However, now the point to be noted is that instead of pushing the message, people have now moved to opt-in based database communication.

There are many ways how people are generating lists, through Whitepapers / Research Reports / Surveys / Email list building newsletters and Micro sites and landing pages etc.

Many solution providers provide email marketing system which are on demand and web based like: http://www.responsys.com/ , http://www.e-dialog.com/ , http://www.constantcontact.com/ , http://www.verticalresponse.com/ , http://www.exacttarget.com/ , http://www.listrak.com/ , http://www.returnpath.com/ , http://www.vtrenz.com/ , http://www.bronto.com/ , http://www.lyrishq.com/ , http://www.epsilon.com/ , http://www.yesmail.com/ , Experian – Cheetah Mail, Acxiom, Harte-Hanks and Datran

Porn Sites, Torrents, Software Downloads:

Yes, sex, videos, hot are amongst the world’s most searched terms, if you were searching for “hot trends in videos”, with high probability it land you on to a porn site intentionally or unintentionally. And a lot of them do catch your attention. It’s a quick source of gratification and you would see these websites as target for heavy advertising from many B2C websites. Even though you may not buy in to the philosophy of your company’s remote association with these sites, but practically, these websites generate traffic to your websites.

People of all ages and genders and all geographies visit these websites, and they become a potential target to promote that viral video of your which is part of your marketing campaign.

Similar to these are the Torrents and Software Download websites: In recent campaigns done by http://www.ibibo.com/ they leveraged the torrents and software download websites very effectively. They actually created and posted torrents worldwide of most searched items like e-books, softwares, movies, videos, cracks and keygens etc and when someone will actually download and run those files, they were asked to enter their email address and were automatically directed towards the website.

Viral Videos and Interactive Marketing

These days many organizations are leveraging the Viral Videos to promote their products and services worldwide. The success of the Viral Video campaigns has actually given rise to companies like http://www.webchutney.com/ , http://www.interactiveavenues.com/ , http://www.goviral.com/ , http://www.quasar.co.in/ and more…

* this post is not yet completed. I will be adding more content soon on Behavioural Marketing, Triggered Ads, Landing pages and microsites and related content.

Ode to Prof Ranjan Das – IIM C | The Strategy Academy

Ode to Prof Ranjan Das The Strategy Academy

I just finished my last blog entry and saw this Google Adsense ad of The Strategy Academy on my blog. And the first thing I remembered was Prof. Ranjan Das.

Anybody who would have studied at IIM Calcutta couldn’t have missed one personality on campus: Prof. Ranjan Das.

The One man who is passionate about education and strategy, and who with his charismatic leadership has helped so many leaders worldwide to excel in there careers. He has finally fulfilled his dream of entrepreneurship and started his own college, The Strategy Academy at this age.

I remember the time when he last spoke to me addressing the class and mentioning about his new venture of the Strategy Academy where he wanted to show the world a new path of why Strategy is important and how it is relevant in today’s business. He categorically said, you need to identify and challenge the status quo and finally move ahead to the desired state.

This is a perfect example of how leaders stand by there words and how Prof. Das has converted his vision into reality.

Hats off to you sir!

Buyer Types – Intuitive, Thinkers, Feelers, Sensors

If psychologists were to define the purchasing behavior and the “kind” of people who buy, it would be something like this:

Intuitive: This group uses intuition to concentrate on possibilities, avoiding details in favor of a “Big Picture” view, they are susceptible to a “next generation” strategy of differentiation. For eg, when Advil positioned ibuprofen tablets as “advanced medicine for pain, they perfectly differentiated themselves as the “Big Picture” crowd.

Thinkers: This group is analytics, precise and logical. They possess a lot of information, often ignoring the emotional or feeling aspect of situation and frequently act in response to the facts about the product. BMW’s differentiating strategy of “ultimate driving machine” and discussion of ergonomic design and maneuverability plays well with “thinkers”.

Feelers: This group dispenses with intellectual analysis in favor of following there own preferences, an ideal group for third party endorsements for experts who look and sound real. Miracle-grows “choice of experts” campaign (nice people surrounded by flowers) is the perfect “feeler” strategy.

Sensors: This group sees things as they are and has a great respect for facts, an enormous capacity for detail and a knack for putting things into context. Hertz’s differentiating strategy for leadership (“there’s Hertz and there’s not exactly”) is a great program for sensors, who accept it as common sense that the company is the best.

Top 5 Viral-Video Ads of 2007

Top 5 Viral-Video Ads of 2007 – A true Viral Marketing strategy well executed
Cadbury’s gorilla drummer ad, with more than 5 million views for the original video on YouTube, was the top viral-video ad, followed by Smirnoff’s Green Tea Partay, with 3.4m views, according to agency GoViral, reports the Financial Times.
The top 5 viral-video ads:
Cadbury – Gorilla Drummer, launched online in August; agency: Fallon.
Smirnoff – Green Tea Partay, launched online in August; agency: JWT, New York.
Ray-Ban – Catch Sunglasses, launched online in May; agency, Cutwater.
Blendtec – Will it Blend? launched online in July.
Lynx/Axe – Bom chicka wah wah, launched online in May; agency BBH, Copenhagen.

Marketing 2.0 – eMarketing, Digital marketing, Interactive Marketing, Online marketing, Internet Marketing, Web marketing…

While I have been writing about Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Professional and social networking, here is the new paradigm or future of marketing or the Marketing 2.0. I was browsing through LinkedIn Answers and saw this question by a gentleman who wanted to know which term you would prefer out of E-Marketing, Web Marketing, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing, Internet Marketing or Interactive Marketing. Well I succinctly answered Marketing 2.0, as that is something which has changed the new rules of marketing and probably would make Kotler re-write his book.

In this entry I am touching upon various elements of Marketing 2.0 and how it can benefit your organization. When I say your organization in this post, I mean both B2B as well as B2C businesses.

These would be some of the basic elements of Marketing 2.0:

Online communities, Blogs, User-generated content, Email Marketing, Viral Videos, Online PR, Flash Ads, Torrents, Porn Sites, Software Downloads, Banners, Link Exchanges, Micro Sites, Landing page optimizations, triggered ads, behavioral ads, web analytics, SEO SMO and SEM.

Online communities, Blogs, Social / Professional Networking and User Generated Content: –

Earlier I wrote about push marketing being dead and how 4Rs of marketing namely Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain has changed the approach of marketing to customer centric marketing.

This can be simple achieved today through online communities or Blogs where users generate content and the content becomes the king. So instead of pushing the message out, you are able to pull the customers towards you and with Content being the king, people get motivated to come back. There are numerous examples of this technique: like LinkedIn, Xing, and many more.

How they sell?

Online communities and blogs market and sell the products through subtle hints which might be relevant to the audience. Considering the context and relevancy approach is more suited to the audience, they tend to look at what is on offer and if that is something which is of importance to them at that time, they make a buying decision.

Email marketing: Many online community and blog owners use an additional tactic of Email marketing. Additionally many product and services companies also leverage email marketing media. It has shown highest ROIs for a long time now and the effectiveness has been good. However, now the point to be noted is that instead of pushing the message, people have now moved to opt-in based database communication.

There are many ways how people are generating lists, through Whitepapers / Research Reports / Surveys / Email list building newsletters and Micro sites and landing pages etc.

Many solution providers provide email marketing system which are on demand and web based like: http://www.responsys.com/ , http://www.e-dialog.com/ , http://www.constantcontact.com/ , http://www.verticalresponse.com/ , http://www.exacttarget.com/ , http://www.listrak.com/ , http://www.returnpath.com/ , http://www.vtrenz.com/ , http://www.bronto.com/ , http://www.lyrishq.com/ , http://www.epsilon.com/ , http://www.yesmail.com/ , Experian – Cheetah Mail, Acxiom, Harte-Hanks and Datran

Porn Sites, Torrents, Software Downloads:

Yes, sex, videos, hot are amongst the world’s most searched terms, if you were searching for “hot trends in videos”, with high probability it land you on to a porn site intentionally or unintentionally. And a lot of them do catch your attention. It’s a quick source of gratification and you would see these websites as target for heavy advertising from many B2C websites. Even though you may not buy in to the philosophy of your company’s remote association with these sites, but practically, these websites generate traffic to your websites.

People of all ages and genders and all geographies visit these websites, and they become a potential target to promote that viral video of your which is part of your marketing campaign.

Similar to these are the Torrents and Software Download websites: In recent campaigns done by http://www.ibibo.com/ they leveraged the torrents and software download websites very effectively. They actually created and posted torrents worldwide of most searched items like e-books, softwares, movies, videos, cracks and keygens etc and when someone will actually download and run those files, they were asked to enter their email address and were automatically directed towards the website.

Viral Videos and Interactive Marketing

These days many organizations are leveraging the Viral Videos to promote their products and services worldwide. The success of the Viral Video campaigns has actually given rise to companies like http://www.webchutney.com/ , http://www.interactiveavenues.com/ , http://www.goviral.com/ , http://www.quasar.co.in/ and more…

* this post is not yet completed. I will be adding more content soon on Behavioural Marketing, Triggered Ads, Landing pages and microsites and related content.

Mass Customization – How Software as a Service (SaaS) enables customer centric behavior

Mass Customization – How Software as a Service (SaaS) enables customer centric behavior
One Sunday afternoon while I was reading a book on manufacturing, I read this interesting term called Mass Customization and I was wondering what exactly it meant. Though I couldn’t understand it fully at that time in terms of how practically feasible it is going to be, when I later started learning more about marketing, I realized the power of mass customization.

Facebook: A perfect example of mass customization. Here I choose what I want and customize my software (applications / front-page) according to my needs.
Salesforce.com: Another brilliant example of web based database crunching and CRM system.
Google Docs: Another example of a web based product delivery as a service.

So why Mass Customization is important?
Well the people in sales would agree with me on the point that, whenever you visit a prospect and present your product / service to them, one question which you always want to avoid but seems unavoidable: Can we customize this?
“Now, after spending so much money on research and development my company came-up with a product and still this customer wants to customize this”, would be an obvious thought in anyone’s mind. However, you do know that the customer is asking for customized feature/s as their organizational needs are different. This is mostly true for every organization.

So what to do?
Well you can do 2 things: Keep making that installable software which sits and runs on someone’s systems, fixing bugs in it and charge customers for every new feature or customization they want.
Or
Choose a model which is delivered through web or is On-Demand. Provide software as a service.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Though in certain cases it might not be possible to do mass customization, however, in the cases where you can deliver Software as a Service with customization options, this is what you can expect:
The Good: Long term loyalty, more flexibility and easy scalability, continuous management revenue, better service, better products, low cost products, open platforms, mass customizable by worldwide contributors, continuous partnership revenues.
The Bad: High initial investment like high porting costs, integration cost etc, initial implementation barriers, however, in long term the product delivery costs come down considerably and you outperform in the fierce competition of today’s world
The Ugly: I am yet to think what worst can happen, may be customers become more and more demanding and may just ask for something over the board…

Things to look for in the coming time: Mashups and Customizable Business Applications, like longjump

Why Suddenly this?
Well think of this: Your organization spends thousands and millions of dollars in managing the IT infrastructure, quality and security. And then repeat costs of up gradation, licensing and more…
So if you get a safe, secure, on-demand system which can save your time, effort and money, obviously you would want to do that. And in this web 2.0 world this exactly has been done and is now possible for you.
As the desktops are being converted to virtual desktops or web tops this was the most obvious change for you.
What’s next?
As always, the product lifecycle will take its own time, even after certain known failures this time in the software scenario and web 2.0 world this should work!